How time caught up with reality TV's top starmaker

With ‘The Next Act’, Simon Cowell has effectively remade ‘The X Factor’ for Netflix - and it’s bleak

- Adam White

Simon Cowell arrives on a jet ski, his face gone berserk. His cheeks are plumped, his teeth blinding. His new Netflix show, he tells us, is his last chance. “If I can’t get it right,” he says, “I'll have to accept that I’ve lost whatever I had before.” It was oh-so-simple in his heyday. You could just grab a handful of boys off a street corner, wax them down and Topman their wardrobes, ship them to a recording studio in Sweden, and get a top-five hit. Yes, often they ended up cursed to the Butlin’s circuit once the attention died down, or got jobs as forklift drivers or OnlyFans models or Celebrity Big Brother contestants. But god, it was easy. When did it all go sideways?

Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which launched on Netflix yesterday, follows the pop mogul as he attempts to put together a new boyband. But don’t let the fly-on-the-wall, talking-head docuseries sheen fool you — this is your standard X Factor riff. It’s awash with producer-orchestrated drama and the storytelling tropes that made that show appointment viewing on Saturday nights 10 or 15 years ago, but which now seem hoary and geriatric, like something vaguely offensive once said by Louis Walsh. He even surrounds himself with low-wattage versions of Nicole Scherzinger or Cheryl: there’s the Little Mix songwriter Kamille, and another songwriter who looks a bit like Jason Schwartzman with a ponytail. He’s even dragged Pete Waterman out of the cupboard he's been locked in for the last few decades.

Different, though, is the sense of race-against-the-clock fatalism that Cowell now exhibits. I do believe him when he says he thinks it might all be over. The X Factor stopped making real superstars years before its “resting” in 2019.